At the IAB Leadership Conference today, a compelling case was made for generative AI as a tool to bring humanity back into marketing – as counter-intuitive as that may seem.
A panel discussion moderated by Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB, Liana Dubois, CMO at Nine, and Leandro Perez, SVP and CMO, Australia and New Zealand, at Salesforce, outlined how AI is transforming the industry by enabling marketers to focus more on creativity, strategy, and consumer connection.
Dubois called for a greater emphasis on putting the consumer at the heart of decision-making, expressing serious concern about the increasing distance between marketers and their audiences. She pointed out that marketing has increasingly drifted from its core purpose of understanding and influencing people.
“Let’s put humans back at the centre. Put the consumer at the heart of the decisions that we make,” Dubois explained.
“If we put the consumer at the heart of what we do, the business will follow”.
“It’s about how you influence humans to think, feel or do something as a consequence of what you’re doing”.
An interesting, and perhaps unexpected, way to do this, Dubois and Perez suggested, lies in the advancement of Gen AI.
Leandro Perez, citing Salesforce’s recent survey of over 280 Australian CEOs, said that generative AI is a top-three priority for leadership due to its dual ability to grow revenue and reduce costs. He framed AI as a tool to augment human capabilities, not replace them – hence leaving more time and space for a more human touch where it really matters.
Perez shared an example from Salesforce’s work with Mecca, where an AI-powered assistant, Miss Mecca, now handles three-quarters of customer queries.
“This allows customer service representatives to focus on more creative and value-adding tasks, enhancing the customer experience,” Perez explained.
Dubois echoed these sentiments, adding, “There’s a great creative opportunity with AI. It’s not about eliminating human creativity, but enhancing it”.
A Balanced Approach to Strategy
According to Dubois, the number one priority for the year ahead, in a challenging economic market, is striking a more structured balance between immediate performance metrics and long-term brand growth. As she pointed out, there is a troubling trend toward “short-termism”, driven by economic pressures, which she believes undermines the broader marketing goals.
“I hope marketing budgets get returned to scale in the not-too-distant future,” Dubois said.
She noted that only 5-15 per cent of customers are typically in-market at any given time, stressing the importance of building demand for the future and not just focussing on short-term performance metrics.
“Marketing is both a short and a long game. We need to bring more balance back to that,” she explained.
“I worry that we have in this environment where we are only capitalising on that existing demand. And the reality is, is that depending on the category that you’re in and the life cycle of the purchase of your product, only five to 15 per cent of your customers might actually be in the market today. The other 85 to 95 per cent of them might not be in the market for a month, three months, six months, 12 months, or five years if you’re a car brand. So we’ve really got to start to bring more balance back to that short and that long game”.
With generative AI at the forefront, marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to blend the precision of technology with the empathy of human ingenuity, redefining how brands build relationships in the digital age.
